See You Later, Hellgater. Yes.

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This broke a couple of days ago, but it’s the sort of thing worth mentioning in the Public Record Of PC Games that is RPS. I’ll keep it short. Remember Hellgate closing? And then to open in the lands of not-us? Well, now it’s to return to the lands of us. When I say “us”, I mean “RPS”. Not trying to start some kind of race war against anyone from South East Asia, where Hellgate was already going to happily play around. I leave the starting of race wars to Walker. Or Jim. Or, if he’s in a particularly bad mood, Alec. I will never start a race war. Except against the 100m dash. I hate that with all my heart. DIE SHORT SPRINTS, DIE.

Founder4Life (of the original game as licensed and operated by Flagship). There was exactly 15 months of play time in its original incarnation. At 10 bucks a month, us Founders got exactly our money’s worth apparently. It would be nice if us Founders were recognized and compensated, but I would expect nothing more than an ingame albatross necklace or some other such item. Hanbitsoft never saw a penny of my money, so why should they feel obligated to make right? It sure would be a nice gesture, though.

I am looking forward to playing this again with my friends, no matter the publisher.

I’m not quite certain about that indeed, admittedly :) I haven’t seen a lot of the PvE and solo sides of Global Agenda, a focus of HG:L. PvP on the other hand, the focus of Global Agenda, seems fairly well-executed so far. But I’ll have to play a bit more than my 2 hours and one PvP match before I can properly judge.

I am, however, a PvP and shooter player at heart. Thus for me, I guess a PvP centric game revolving around shooter mechanics will have an easier time convincing me than a PvE centric one merely inspired by shooter mechanics.

I really feel sorry for the lifetime subscribers – dudes got a raw deal right there. That said, I’m really glad Hellgate is coming back. The huge v2.0 patch (it was over a gig – much of bigness and stuff) that launched literally weeks before they closed down turned it into the game that should have launched in the first place. It was really quite good, and probably my favourite diablo clone.. for just a few weeks. Fuck.

I recently found myself in the bizarre situation of playing through Borderlands co-op, getting about two thirds of the way through, and thinking ‘Aside from the guns, Hellgate did all of this better’. The loot, the huge swarms of monsters, the character growth and all that. Oh, and the feeling of indescribable badassery when you’ve fought your way through literally fifty zombies in 15 seconds, sending most of them either flying comically through the air or exploding into a cloud of gore.

Hell, Borderlands even got weaker in combat the further you played – enemies identical to the ones you’ve killed a thousand times over got bizarrely tough, and a compeltely unarmored midget would barely flinch to a point-blank shotgun blast to the face.

So hurrah that it’s coming back! Here’s hoping that it’s going to be a free-to-download/play dealie, so that it might just get a decent community this time round. Here’s hoping that they do include some kind of perks for people with the original version, though.

And defeating him gave you the essence of pure distilled human kindness…

In all seriousness though, I really can’t remember..loved Hellgate to death though, despite its bugs and flaws. It really was heart-breaking to stick with it and see what a difference all the patches and polish made to it as time went on, only for it to have the rug pulled out from under it at the point when it really could have done with a re-launch.

First the downsides. The bugs were sometimes crippling, with team members not appearing in the right instances, UI’s turning invisible, and sometimes invisible enemies. Also, there was the issue with items that stacked, but never let you split the stacks, and quest items that would duplicate but never let you drop them. Plus the end boss was weak really, bit of a build up to nothing alas.

However, almost all of the above got fixed by the end. A recipe transforming cube was added (Secret cow level rumours ahoy!!!), the Stonehenge area with its endless challenge plains proved a genuinely hard and enjoyable way to pass the time in a team (kind of like an endless raid with ever improving loot). There were issues with the Stonehenge quests and bosses, but again these were re-balanced and fixed by the end. The shots and previews of the final large patch, and the plays of it on the test server (of a vast underground cavern world) would have been truly incredible had it finally seen the light of day.

Randomly generated ruined cities, loot galore, a real feeling of epic battles in some of the PvE solo missions, and later on, some rather nice hell-fire filled locales…I really do miss this game. The more I right about it, the more it makes me want to grab the DVD case behind me and reinstall it all over again.

If only the funds had been there to implement everything up to Patch 2.0 BEFORE they released it, and this game would have soared high, and still be with us in its original form today.

….oh, but please PLEASE GOD let them rebalance the Gunners RapidFire and Ricochet skill combo. Otherwise, you might as well right off Pvp. ;-)

Yeah, the weapons in Hellgate really weren’t designed for PvP at all – they’re weapons of mass destruction, geared towards as killing as many things as as you can in the shortest possible time, usually by saturating a wide area with poisonous burning electric ghost-explosions.

It was way better co-op. Mainly beacuse it scaled everything up. Enemies were slightly tougher, but generally it just spawned more of them. Lots more. You’d be walking along and 15 felbores would burst up around you and start clawing your arse off.

It’s sad that it’s remembered as the worst thing since sliced Hitler by so many, because it really did improve a lot after launch.